Daughters of Thunder is a wonderful compilation of thirty-eight
first-time-published sermons of fourteen African American female
preachers, many of whom were the first African American females to
pastor churches, receive ordination, and be granted terminal degrees.
The author, Dr. Bettye Collier-Thomas, is the founding executive
director of Washington, D.C.’s Bethune Museum Archives, Inc., the first
institution in the country to focus on preserving and documenting the
history of African American women. A historian and publisher of
numerous articles in the areas of African American and African American
women’s history, Collier-Thomas also is currently an associate
professor of history at Temple University, where she directs the Center
for African American History and Culture. She has received several
grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford
Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Collier-Thomas’s scholarly achievements are a testament to the
thorough attention that she gives in her analysis and discussion of the
sermons. Each is analyzed in light of the life experiences and
theological orientation of the speaker, as well as within the context
of the prevailing ideologies and social forces of the era in which each
preacher lived.
Collier-Thomas’s choice to draw the book’s title from Shango, the
West African god of lightening and thunder, was most befitting of the
force and authority with which these women spoke to the social,
political, and economic issues of their time. The sermonic messages of
renowned and obscure figures such as Julia A.J. Foote, Harriet Baker,
Mary J. Small, Florence Spearing Randolph, Mary G. Evans, Ella Eugene
Whitfield, Ruth R. Dennis, Mrs. Raiff, Rosa Horn, Ida B. Robinson, Rosa
Edwards, Quinceila Whitlow, F.E. Redwine, and Pauli Murray are included
in the collection.
In her exploration of works by these ordained sisters,
Collier-Thomas found that despite the writers’ denominational
differences — African Methodist Episcopal (AME), AME Zion, Baptist,
Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME), Holiness, Pentecostal, and Spiritual
— gender issues, holiness doctrine, moral and social issues, and
theology were common themes addressed in many of the sermons.
Part one of Daughters of Thunder examines sermons that were
delivered by Foote, Baker, and Small between 1851 and 1898. These early
messages reflect the social forces — such as overt racism, sexism, and
economic disadvantages — against which the authors struggled. It also
highlights the family sacrifices that were often made to accommodate
the pursuit of each preacher’s calling.
The sermon writers also suggested that the advancement of the Black
race could result from individual and collective inner and outer
sanctification (holiness doctrine), and by attending to the development
of a healthy self-image and concept of the African American female, who
plays a primary role in the socialization of the family.
